CHINESE CHRISTIANS
Kublai Khan was
intrigued by European
religion and would have
been aware of Christian
communities already
established in China.
The Xi’an monument
(above), erected in
a.d. 781, cites the
arrival of the Nestorian
Christians in Xi’an,
capital of the Tang,
in 635.
AKG/ALBUM
Although Polo’s pioneering Travels
awakened mass interest in the lands of the
East, he was by no means the first European
to travel into the heart of the Mongol lands.A Family of Travelers
Europe’s great seafaring republic, Venice,
maintained a vast network of trading contacts
throughout the Mediterranean and Middle
East. It was poised to begin expanding its trade
network eastward. Venice was home to mer-
chants with an in-depth knowledge of the East
and among the best placed to chase riches.
Throughout the medieval period, they traveled
the routes east to Trebizond, the gateway to the
Silk Road (located in today’s Trabzon in modern
Turkey). Goods moved between China and Eu-
rope along this route.Marco Polo came from a family of mer-
chants. When he was a small child, his father
Niccolò and uncle Maffeo were already amass-
ing some remarkable travel experiences. The
shrewd traders had left Venice in 1261 to forge
new relationships in the East. The pair had
met the Mongolian khan as part of this first
epic journey.
One of the Polos’ commercial bases was
Constantinople, where their brother, Marco
senior, worked. Their agents operated up the
Volga River into Bukhara. It was there in mod-
ern Uzbekistan that Niccolò and Maffeo had
pulled off a major diplomatic feat: They met
members of Kublai Khan’s government and
arranged an expedition to his court in Shangdu
(in Inner Mongolia in modern China).
Their meeting with Kublai Khan was one of
history’s great encounters between East and
West. In the khan, the two Venetians found a
man whose curiosity about the West matched
theirs about the East. The relationship they
built with the Mongols made the brothers pi-
oneering intermediaries, a conduit through
which knowledge of Europe and China could
travel in both directions.
Intrigued by what the brothers told him
about Europe (and especially about Christi-
anity), the khan asked them to return to Eu-
rope and petition the pope to send learned
men to teach the Mongols about Christianity.
The Polos’ return home was long and arduous.
Things became more complicated when they
reached Acre (in modern Israel) and learned
that Pope Clement IV had died, and there was
no elected successor.
The brothers continued back to Venice,
where they would await a new pope and plan
their return to the court of Kublai Khan. This
time, they would bring Niccolò’s son, Marco. A
boy when the father had last seen him 10 years
ago, he was now a young man at 17 years old.To the Court of Khan
In 1271 father, son, and uncle left Venice and
sailed to Acre. From there they swung north-
east, taking a route that stretched overland
through eastern Anatolia and Armenia to Ta-
briz, in present-day Azerbaijan. Next they68 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019